(1)Sonic the Hedgehog vs (11)Mewtwo vs (7)Bowser 2013
Results Round 3 Monday, September 2nd, 2013 Ulti's Analysis We needed a relaxing match after the LSD nonsense, and we would end up getting one. But even a "relaxing" match can be a huge surprise in the Summer 2013 Contest, because Mewtwo winning this thing as easily as he did was not expected at all. It may not have been completely out of left field since Mewtwo was the character targeted as an anti-Draven rallying point, but I don't even know if Mewtwo needed the extra help to do as well as he did this contest. He's gone berserk in the multi-way gimmick type contests before, most notably in 2008 when he advanced through three rounds of fourway nonsense to make the contest quarterfinal that year. This match was supposed to originally be a resolution of the Sonic/Vincent/Bowser stuff that people were peddling, and I maintain Sonic wins that hypothetical match with ease. But apparently if you replace Vincent with Mewtwo, you get Mewtwo ending things within a couple hours. Even the vaunted Sonic day vote that's saved his crew so many times in the past was no where to be found here, as Sonic put up very little resistance once the sun came up en route to Mewtwo winning by almost 4000 votes. Mewtwo wasn't going to beat Draven by any stretch, but getting that far and proving that he would have won the match had the rallies stayed off of Reddit was one hell of an accomplishment for the guy this year. Zen's (Late) Analysis Spilling out of Link vs Draven was a match that had been fairly highly contested until this point. Nobody predicted there would be this much spillage from a rally. Yeah, the rallies had affected votals a little bit, but not to this extent. I don't know if any of us had predicted the Draven rally to be so much bigger in Round 3. I remember visiting one of the Draven rally threads on Reddit after the match was over, and while most comments were discussing how buttdecimated we all were, there were a few here and there saying "dang, I missed it, oh well, voted for Mewtwo" I don't know how much crossover there is between LoL and Pokemon but I'm assuming if you're hardcore enough to go to LoL communities you're probably enough of a huge nerd to absolutely love Pokemon. (ok that's a stretch but follow me here) This is slightly unrelated, but I read some statistics a few months back (that I can't find now, of course) and a lot of the people playing Fortnite have never played another online game before, and there's a chunk where they consider it their first "real game." LoL was huge at the time, I wouldn't be surprised if there were people voting who had never played a Sonic or Mario game but loved the Pokemon anime, but that's just personal conjecture. Originally people were arguing that Bowser would be strong enough to hold Mewtwo back for Sonic to take a win. After all, Ganondorf held back Mario enough for Vivi to win, so Sonic shouldn't have a problem here, right? Well, there's also the weird Nintendo SFF that includes Sonic on some level, but he's still SONIC, Noble Nine member and contest vet. Mewtwo didn't even double Phoenix Wright. Unfortunately for us it was 2013 and Mewtwo absolutely embarrassed Sonic thanks to rally spillover. You can champion the righteous cause of "rallies" all you want, but the definite downside is the negative effects it has on other matches. Reddit and tumblr links often stay circulating for days, and, yes, the GameFAQs site views go up, but our morale go down. Without the rally here, would Sonic have taken this in the year of Pokefear? Probably. Phoenix Wright was either really impressive in 2013 or Mewtwo was on rally roids in R3. Probably more the latter than anything. These results did get us hyped up that Mewtwo would be the anti-Draven, though. Pokefear had become our ally, like Magus or that food critic from Ratatouille. Category:2013 Contest Matches